


Half-Measure

by audreycritter



Series: Cor Et Cerebrum [6]
Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, Young Justice (Comics)
Genre: Gen, batdad dads everyone, brink of adulthood, heart to heart talks, life choices and identity, wanton implied future use of a violin
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-03-19
Updated: 2019-03-19
Packaged: 2019-11-24 06:23:47
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,647
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18162449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/audreycritter/pseuds/audreycritter
Summary: Conner Kent needs some direction and so he goes to Bruce Wayne, because for some reason that sounded like a good idea.CECverse but stands alone as a one-shot.





	Half-Measure

**Author's Note:**

> This fits in CEC after Foreign Object, in the summer after Bruce’s surgery. Reading that is actually not at all necessary to understanding this.

The patter of rain on glass didn’t drown out the hundred thousand noises of Gotham to the south, but it made it easier to shut them out. Conner Kent sat on the edge of a leather chair in Bruce Wayne’s study, feeling supremely uncomfortable, with his snapback hat in his hands.

Whatever he had expected or planned, it was not this. It was not staring at the green ink blotter on Bruce Wayne’s desk while Bruce Wayne stared at him, reading glasses perched on the end of his nose and stacks of stapled papers spread in front of him. He was waiting expectantly, with no obvious emotion on his face. Conner resisted the urge to squirm under that gaze, and resolved to stop teasing Tim so much about his dad being difficult.

“So,” Conner started. He stopped. He ran a finger along the brim of his black cap.

“Hn,” Bruce said. “If you need a moment, do you mind if I…”

He gestured to the papers and Conner’s exhale was relieved.

“Yeah, yeah, of course. Go ahead.”

Bruce uncapped his pen.

“It’s just,” Conner said, slouching back in the chair. The pen, suspended over a paper, froze for a second and then the scratch of it filled the room. “It’s just, I’m going crazy in Smallville, right? I’m stagnating. And I know Ma means well but if I have to spend another week looking at cows every morning I’m going to lose my mind.”

“Did you mistake me for Tim,” Bruce asked dryly, his attention on the papers he was pushing apart with two fingers. He gathered them together and shuffled them against the desk to line up the edges.

“No, no,” Conner said quickly, a little angrily, as he sat forward.

“Relax, Conner,” Bruce said, one corner of his mouth flicking upward. “It was a joke.”

“Oh,” Conner said, slumping back again. “Well.”

“Go on,” Bruce said.

“I need to talk to you,” Conner said, sinking further down and unclasping the snaps of the hat. He clasped them again.

“That is currently happening,” Bruce said. He rifled through papers while Conner watched and swallowed and felt his palms go slick with sweat. He tried to organize his thoughts into some semblance of order— Tim was always telling him to strategize— but they were just as hard to collect as they had been for weeks.

“Do you remember trashing the dining room?” Conner asked abruptly, the words flying out of his mouth. He wanted to snatch them back the second they were out, but he had a small and perverse pleasure in watching them drift across the room and settle over Bruce. That impassive expression didn’t so much as falter, which was disappointing.

“Which time,” Bruce said, and if there wasn’t a world of information packed in that that Conner didn’t miss.

“I was, uh…well, over a year ago,” Conner said. “I flew out here because I heard Tim’s heart rate go wild. I wanted to check on him.”

 _Strategize, Kon, for the love of fudgesicles,_ Tim yelped in his head.

“You came to check on Tim because I scared him,” Bruce said, and Conner sat up and put his hat on.

“Y’know, I think this might have been a mistake. Sorry to waste your time, I’ll just go—”

“Stop,” Bruce said, while Conner was on his feet by the door. Conner froze because that was a voice for listening to, even if he hated it. Also, as much as he hated it, he could feel the thin thread that had pulled him here still hooked into him, invisible and strong, like Pa’s fishing line. It reeled him back in and he turned.

“What,” he said sullenly. He needed this. He didn’t have to like it, especially when he was stabbing himself in the back. The chance Bruce had called him back just for a lecture about boundaries was pretty high, actually, now that he thought about it— higher than them finishing anything near the conversation Conner had cleaned his Vans with a magic eraser to have.

“I doubt you came all this way to criticize my failure to maintain self-control, at the cost of my son’s sense of security, a full year after the lapse,” Bruce said, as even-toned as if he’d been commenting on the government of Ancient Rome. “So, sit.”

Conner sat, arms crossed over his chest, and scowled at the floor. Bruce resumed looking straight at him, for long seconds, and then went back to writing.

“He wasn’t scared,” Conner said, after chewing on his lip and considering. “He was…worried.”

“I don’t blame him for being frightened. It’s a frightening thing when an adu—”

“He wasn’t scared, okay?” Conner snapped. “God. He was worried about you, he said you were having some kind of flashback, and that it happened sometimes and I don’t know why the hell I brought it up except…”

He trailed off and threw his head back with an irritated huff, one carefully calculated to be only air and not subzero temperatures. The ceiling was so high he probably could have risked it some.

The absence of sound was what made him realize Bruce had stopped working and had gone back to staring at him. Conner glanced at him, at the thoughtful expression that had replaced the blank mask.

“What,” he said.

“I want you to answer honestly, Kon,” Bruce said. His voice now had some quality Conner couldn’t identify, something that wasn’t the flat monotone.

“Maybe,” Conner agreed.

“Are you having, or do you think you’re having, flashbacks?”

Those ice blue eyes boring right into him reminded him of glaciers near the Fortress and of Clark when he was sad. Conner held the gaze steadily, while his mind clicked through still images of possibility like high school science class slides. The Kent farm razed. Tim’s body broken. A building leveled.

What Conner wanted was to be furious at the implication that he might lose it like that, and he dug desperately for some scrap of that anger so he could blow on the coals of it, while still locked on Bruce’s face. There was some tendril of it, simmering deep, but it was so intertwined with an aching unfairness that he couldn’t summon it.

And then there was the hurt, the familiar sting of knowing he was dangerous— he’d tried to ignore that for a long time, trusting himself to keep a grip on his own power, but more and more recently he was pulling it out and spending time with that fact. That dampened his anger a bit, kept his limbs and mouth frozen. He couldn’t yell at Bruce about that implication of mistrust, not knowing what he did about himself, and not when it was sure to look like he was hiding something and then Clark and Ma would probably be called and then he’d be benched and questioned and…

 _See, Tim? I can strategize,_ he thought.

He didn’t look away from Bruce and he shook his head tightly.

“No,” he said, his mouth dry. “No, sir.”

“Alright,” Bruce said. “Can I get you something to drink?”

“Zesti,” Conner said, quickly. “If you’ve got it.”

“Stay here,” Bruce said. He limped going out of the room and a quick scan showed a thin fracture in his tibia, not quite healed. Conner frowned at that and wondered if Tim knew.

Conner got up and crouched by the sound system. The sleek bench had hidden ports for wires but was centered around a record player, the needle suspended over blank space. A shelf of vinyl sleeves was nearby and he thumbed through them, curious.

He was holding the softly-worn cardboard of _Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band_ in his hands when Bruce returned. Conner slid the record back into place quickly and stood.

Bruce handed him a tall glass of dark cola, clinking with ice and a stainless steel straw, and then sat on the couch with his own mug of coffee. Conner debated sitting with him but instead turned the leather armchair to face the couch and dropped back into it.

“Thanks,” Conner said, raising the glass slightly.

“Hn,” Bruce said.

There had been half a dozen points Conner could have escaped before this one, but now he felt like he’d locked himself into the conversation. He was debating how to actually, really start when Bruce spoke.

“I am not known for emotional aptitude,” he said bluntly. “You have a reasonably healthy relationship with Clark. You have friends. I could be wrong, but I seriously doubt you are here for advice about feelings. There must be, then, something else bothering you, something you feel you cannot discuss with Clark or your peers. It is something important to you and you have put it off as long as possible before seeking me out, because I cannot imagine I am anything but a last resort. Am I wrong?”

Conner drained half the Zesti from the glass, feeling sick the entire time, and then he leaned forward and put it on the coffee table. Bruce slid a coaster under the sweating glass without a word.

“Yes,” Conner said finally.

“About which part,” Bruce said.

Conner hung his hat on his knee and put his head in his hands, palms pressed over his eyes and fingertips tangled in his hair.

“I don’t know where to…”

He paused and there wasn’t a word to rush or reassure him either way. That same undefinable dread climbed up his throat, choking him in a way air couldn’t fix. Why _had_ he come to Bruce? Tim adored him, even when annoyed by him, but what part of his convoluted little clone brain had thought this was…

The realization spilled into his head the same second it spilled out of his mouth.

“I was with Cass last month and she said I was afraid,” he said, not missing the way Bruce stiffened. “We were just tossing a baseball on the farm. I don’t know why she said it.”

“Cassandra— my Cassandra— was tossing a baseball with you,” Bruce said.

“No, we were making out in the barn and I was taking my pants off when she decided to tell me I was afraid, okay?” Conner said, words like razors. There was this feeling he had, sometimes, watching Tim hurl himself into the middle of explosions— a _you idiot_ paired with _oh_ _my_ _god_ , _no_ — and for the first time Conner had the experience of feeling that about himself, watching Bruce Wayne go white and tense. Bruce’s hand was wrapped around the coffee mug so hard Conner could hear the porcelain creaking on a molecular level.

“Cassandra is old enough to—” Bruce began, and Conner could also hear the fluctuating blood pressure and how much that control was costing him, and if he made Batman have a stress heart attack he’d never once hear the end of it from Clark or Tim.

“Chill out,” Conner muttered. “We were playing catch, we play catch sometimes. It’s not like that for me and Cass anymore, okay, and even if it was do you think I’d be stupid enough to just say that shit to you.”

He felt that maybe the sharp glare was deserved so he did his best to ignore it. He picked up the cola and sipped some more.

“She said you were afraid,” Bruce said, when his heart sounded almost normal again.

“Yeah, except I’m not, okay? So I don’t know why she said it or why it’s been…been bothering me so much, when she’s obviously wrong, except I can’t stop thinking about it and getting angry all over again that she clearly misread something that isn’t there which is completely unlike her because Cass isn’t…she doesn’t…”

“She isn’t wrong,” Bruce said simply. “Not about things like this.”

“Maybe it’s because I’m half-alien, right? The body language is off, so…” Conner couldn’t seem to finish sentences anymore and that was a new development he didn’t particularly care for. He even knew while he was saying it that it wasn’t the answer.

“I think Cassandra would be better at explaining her thought process than me,” Bruce said.

“Uh, have you met Cass. Explanations are not exactly her strong suit, no offense,” Conner said. He put the glass of stained ice back on the coaster, watching the brown rivulets run through the grooves of melting cubes. “I asked. I got nothing.”

The ice was the most interesting thing in the universe, suddenly, and he studied it for a long time.

“Conner,” Bruce said, after a while, and his voice was weirdly gentle. “What is going on?”

“I don’t…” Conner said, his throat swelling tight. “I’m not afraid, okay, I’m not…it’s just, you know when you, uh, flashback or whatever, and wreck a room? You just fuck shit up and then clean it up after, Tim said you helped clean it up, but you got to…lose it. You get to flip tables and break chairs and shatter dishes and I don’t…I don’t get that. I don’t get to do that. I can’t. Even if I go find an abandoned building, it belongs to someone, and even _then_ it’s not like I get to hit that wall of being worn out so I have to stop.”

“This sounds like a conversation you should be having with Clark,” Bruce said quietly. “So why come to me?”

“Because, uh…” Conner blinked and used the back of his hand to scrub tears off his cheeks. He wished his hat was on so he could pull it down low, but it would be too obvious to put it on now. “You know what it feels like to need it.”

“It isn’t pleasant.”

“I’m not asking if you think I should experiment with it,” Conner said, a hiss between his teeth. “I’m saying I already—”

“I know,” Bruce said. “I think you’re underestimating Clark’s ability to understand. You don’t think he goes out and pulverizes asteroids sometimes?”

“I mean, I guess,” Conner said, though it hadn’t really occurred to him that Clark might be that kind of aimlessly angry. He always seemed so measured, even when he wasn’t cheerful.

“I will be talking to Clark,” Bruce said. “You need someone who understands the level of outlet you require.”

“That isn’t,” Conner said, hating the way his voice cracked. He flexed his hands and dragged knuckles across his mouth, like scraping off blood. “I don’t exactly want…”

Bruce was silent.

“How do you…not,” Conner said finally. “How do you not lose it all the time. The guidance counselor in Smallville did these exit interviews okay, about our plans for after college, and I lied. I said I was looking forward to taking over the farm. I told her that’s why I wasn’t going to college, why I wasn’t doing…anything. All I do is fly around waiting, I think, I’m just waiting and hoping for an emergency. I want the next crisis to happen already so I can do something that matters. Isn’t that wrong? To need emergencies? There are always people to help but a lot of that’s too easy, which is stupid because they’re _people_ , right? That’s the job. But I still fly around hoping something awful will get the team together.”

Conner closed his eyes and waited for whatever judgment this earned him. Even if it hurt, he found himself welcoming that, because it was maybe a direction to go.

There were the sounds, loud enough in the quiet room, that Conner could have picked out in a crowd— Bruce walking to the desk, slipping on shoes, the clink of mug against marble coaster, the capped pen and set aside papers.

“Come with me,” Bruce said, opening the door. Conner stood and followed in silence all the way to the garage, where Bruce plucked keys off a pegboard and strode toward a low, gray car.

“Get in,” Bruce said, nodding toward the passenger seat.

Conner got in and buckled.

The windshield wipers flicked back and forth, clearing the rain, as they picked up speed down the long drive and then pulled onto the road. It would have been easy to open the door and fly off, but Conner didn’t move.

“What do you like to do when you’re Conner?” Bruce asked, when they were miles away from the house.

“I don’t know,” Conner said, feeling small. He knew what Bruce was asking. Who was he when Superboy wasn’t saving the day? “Hang out with friends? Play video games? Listen to music. Fly.”

“What do you, Conner, contribute to the world?” Bruce asked, glancing sidelong and pinning Conner to the seat with that single piercing glance. His eyes went back to the road and Conner was still as stone.

“What,” he finally managed, “the fuck. I save people all the time, in case you thought we were just running around for kicks. The world a few times, too, thanks for noticing. You really are such a hardass, more than Clark even, and—”

They were pulling into a parking lot and Conner snapped his mouth shut.

“I am not asking because the world deserves to ask more of you,” Bruce said, and it was possibly the most kind Conner had ever heard him sound and something about that stilled the rising fury in his chest and just left him feeling tired. He scrubbed at his eyes again, and the wetness there made him feel like a baby.

“Then…”

“I’m asking because if you are anything like Clark—”

“I’m not like Clark.”

“—if you are anything like Clark, you will not be satisfied with mere distraction or meaningless existence, even outside the cape. You do not take the cape off merely to take a break, otherwise, why bother being Conner at all? Go live at the Fortress.”

The idea of living amidst ice and relics of ruin for the rest of his life sent a chill through Conner more stinging and frigid than any arctic wind. That same dread that had been biting at his heels for weeks roared like a gale into full force and Conner just barely bit back the wordless howl of protest.

It wasn’t Bruce he was fighting.

“I want…” Conner said, in a rasp. “I need to…”

The armrest under his fingers dented and then crumpled into a compressed chunk of metal and broken plastic and suede. He should apologize for that but he found he couldn’t speak.

“Do you think Clark’s work at the Planet is just a cover?” Bruce asked, in that same kind and gentle voice, and god was this what Tim meant when he said people didn’t understand Bruce? That he could just sound like _that_ while Conner’s tension was destroying his car?

“No,” Conner croaked from between clenched teeth. He’d listened to too many rants about life at the Planet to assume Clark considered it a mere smokescreen. He thought he took it too seriously sometimes, but Clark clearly felt it was important.

“This is what is going to happen,” Bruce said, and for some reason his hand was on Conner’s shoulder like Conner couldn’t just rip his arm off if he snapped in the little parked car. “We are going to go into this store and we are going to find you a violin. I am going to buy it for you, and you will take it home and learn to play at least one song. What that song is, I do not care. And you are going to spend that time thinking long and hard about what you want to do with your life as Conner. You will talk to me, and to Clark. After that, you don’t ever have to touch a violin again if you don’t want to, and I will help you find a school, an apartment, a job— whatever it is you decide you need to function as Conner Kent with a future. Do you understand?”

Of the dozen questions this led to, the thank you he should have possibly given, the thing that came out of his mouth was, “Why a violin?”

“Because I am not burdening you with that choice today, I like violins, and the fine motor control required will be a good exercise for you, possibly a better outlet for tension than spending an excess of power.”

“Is this why Clark uses that stupid typewriter?” Conner muttered and Bruce’s laugh was quick, and dry, and real.

“Come on. After, we’re getting lunch.”

“Wait,” Conner said, when Bruce pulled the handle for the driver side door. “I still don’t…I don’t know what Cass meant. Was she wrong?”

The door handle slowly receded into the frame and Bruce sat back in the seat, his hand on the gear shift and idly thumbing the side.

“Do you think she was wrong? It’s a frightening thing to not have purpose.”

“But I…” Conner looked out the window at the rain, the drops splattering and swelling puddles in the parking lot. “I guess I thought I knew.”

“It is not an unusual experience to wrestle with this question,” Bruce said.

“Not everybody is already this messed up,” Conner said, frowning.

“That is one area I do have expertise in,” Bruce said, and the wry smile lifted some weight off Conner’s back. “You’re a good young man, Kon. Tim is proud to have you as a friend.”

“Yeah?” Conner asked, biting his lip. A hand clapped his shoulder and then the door opened.

“Yes. Let’s go.”

Conner took a breath he didn’t need, another breath he didn’t need, and then considered what a future would look like if it was something he wanted.

It was too hazy to have defined shape or clear edges, but it was bright and glittering and washed away the dread rotting in him, like sunlight breaking through a storm.


End file.
